And this:
Question: Is there a big problem with waiting until children are older to vaccinate? If all older children and adults are vaccinated there should still be herd immunity, and presumably difficulty for any epidemic to gain hold. The benefit would be that it would make it clear that there isn't a connection, as the problem now is that autism symptoms show up at approximately the same age as the vaccines are given.
Posted by: Carlie
First, autism is diagnosed before these vaccines are given. Some very clever research was undertaken looking at the abundant videotapes of children's first birthday parties. Researchers identified behaviors that were diagnostic of autism. Prior to that, the diagnosis was most often made when toddlers reached a stage of more social interaction after 12 months of age. The original suggestion vaccines were related to autism had to do with the coincidence vaccines are given at the same age socialization increases. The original research has been discredited, by the way.
Now autism can be diagnosed even younger than one year. It's pretty apparent that the root of autism is either in utero, perinatal, or genetic. The medical community has been unable to get the news media as excited about those discoveries as they have been about the vaccine misinformation.
As for the ideal age for vaccinations and the reasoning and safety of administering them together, in the US that is determined after very careful review and continual monitoring undertaken by the public health service's Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices (ACIP). They meet twice a year to review the research and the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) data. Their findings are public as well as the documentation of their rationale and the hundreds of citations they based their decisions on.
They also alert providers to any problems with vaccines that show up in between the April and October meetings.
Criticism the ACIP is simply an extension of the pharmaceutical companies couldn't be more ignorant. Their decisions are completely transparent, and contrary to the big pharma conspiracy theorists, there is abundant research out there which is not funded by drug companies. There is also a very large and very diverse medical community out there who are capable of and do read the research for themselves, and who are capable of and do evaluate the bias of the source or funding of the research. In fact, it should be rather obvious the medical community is by far better at evaluating the bias and significance of medical research than any layperson conspiracy theorist.
Vaccine age recommendations are based on actual data as to the risk of the specific infections. The earliest given, hepatitis B vaccine, is given just after birth because there are cases of infants contracting hepatitis B at that age. Pertussis and tetanus are risks to infants. It would be dangerous to delay those vaccines. Herd immunity is irrelevant when it comes to tetanus, the bacteria come from dirt not other people. And you need both herd immunity and individual vaccinations to protect infants from pertussis because the vaccine is not good enough without both.
Also, you cannot usually achieve sufficient herd immunity in older populations to protect younger populations because the pool of unvaccinated younger kids would be too large.
Vaccines are given in combinations, one, to decrease the discomfort in giving a child numerous injections, and two, because the data shows if you can give them all together, kids are more likely to get them. If you spread vaccines out, they inevitably get delayed, duplicated (when records of past shots cannot be found) and sometimes missed altogether. Again, we know this from experience, not from guessing or assuming.
Other countries have similar public health systems to evaluate and make vaccine recommendations. There is more consistency in the recommendations between countries than there are discrepancies. Again, for vaccine recommendations to be a big pharma conspiracy it would have to involve the majority of researchers and scientists all over the world, the majority of health care providers all over the world, and all the world's public health systems. Either the entire medical community is in on the scheme or they are a bunch of dupes. You trust them to perform neurosurgery but not to figure out if a vaccine is safe?
There is one more typical antivaxer misinformation I haven't addressed here. That is the notion that 'herd immunity' is somehow the sole objective of the public health system. Nonsense! The objective of this country's public health system and the world's public health systems is to decrease disease burden. The idea herd immunity trumps individual risk is a contradiction in logic. If individuals were somehow sacrificed for herd immunity, you would have by simple analysis, a vaccine risk greater than vaccine benefit.
